Over Coffee
by Aeria
Summary: Snapshot look at the next however many years of Kurt and Blaine together. I suppose one of my many headcanons on where they go, where they end up.


Fic: Over Coffee

Rating: R

Summary: Snapshot look at the next however many years of Kurt and Blaine together. I suppose one of my many headcanons on where they go, where they end up.

Spoilers: up to date, but nothing major

Words: 3000

A/N: This was meant to be a porny drabble. I failed, it is neither anywhere near a drabble, nor is it anywhere near as porny as I can be. This has a dash of angst, I think, as well. Unbetaed, let me know of any glaring mistakes…

Coffee somehow ends up this ongoing theme in their romance. Their very first day, they talk over coffee. Kurt reveals more of himself over that coffee than he has to anyone, ever. They have most of their first conversations, their first fights, at the Lima Bean. During Finals, Blaine always somehow knows when to turn up on Kurt's doorstep with a take away mug or, if it is 3 in the morning, he knows how to move quietly around Kurt's kitchen and make a decent cup of instant.

After finals, Kurt goes on a coffee detox and Blaine kind of has to go along with him. Then, after a month of no caffeine, they fall back into meeting at the Lima Bean almost every day. This is where they talk about the year to come, where they almost cry as they decide breaking up might be the best idea. Blaine almost chokes on his coffee when he realizes both of them are only planning on breaking up for a year, that after that they'll find each other and somehow pick up where they left off. And how very stupid that idea is. So they don't actually break up.

They have one last coffee with Carole and Burt and Finn and Blaine's sister at the airport and when Kurt kisses him, arms looped under his and hands pressing him in tight across his back and Burt keeps watch, their mouths taste of coffee.

They drink even more of it when they're apart than when they were together. To stay up later than ever and talk over skype until 2 in the morning.

They drink it as they speak and it cools as they watch each other get off. The separation isn't anywhere near as hard as they'd thought it would be. They see each other every couple of months and they talk more than ever.

When Blaine gets to New York they find a café midway between their student dorms and start meeting there every day before class. Mondays and Tuesdays are early, 7am starts. Wednesdays they have time to do breakfast. Thursdays Kurt starts late and Blaine starts early and Fridays are the other way around but they get up and met there anyway. They both get so used to being up early that they start going to sleep early as well. And when they can get the time and the space to be alone they so often don't have the energy for more than quiet conversation and touches and then slow soft sex until they fell asleep.

In Kurt's second year they break up over coffee. Not at their usual café, Kurt takes them somewhere else and explains and looks like he's about to cry the whole way through but keeps pausing to sip at the too-hot, too-weak drink and nod to himself. Blaine doesn't touch his own coffee but tells Kurt he's wrong and leaves without paying.

When Kurt rings him six months later and asks him to go for coffee, Blaine refuses. A month after that Kurt rings him and asks him for coffee again and when Blaine refuses with more venom in his voice than before, Kurt tells him he wants him back, that he'd been wrong about all of it. Please, just one coffee.

Blaine agrees. He was always going to. And over two coffees he watches Kurt with as much ice in his gaze as he can muster and finds out exactly how many guys Kurt has been with, exactly what has been wrong with every single one, why Kurt had done it in the first place.

When Kurt tilts his cup and sighs because there's nothing left, Blaine tells him he didn't even go on a date in their six months apart. He's never questioned what they had, has never for a second doubted. He tells Kurt to wait six months and call him again.

Kurt waits and then turns up at Blaine's parents' house in Ohio about a week out from Christmas, wrapped up in a scarf and holding a big boxed present and two cups of Lima Bean coffee. Blaine ushers him into the kitchen where they sit either side of the table and only leave the Christmas lights of the tree and the television in the background to light the scene.

Blaine lets Kurt talk for fifteen straight minutes, mostly because he can. Mostly to see if all the anger really has ebbed away. And he finds his chest panging with something more like guilt as he watches Kurt sip and tries to work out exactly how close to a year it's been since they kissed.

Kurt's apologizing, over and over, but staying strong, almost, saying he's waited his six months and he's still sorry, and he'll keep waiting, and he just wishes the last year had never happened. He calls himself naïve and stupid and says he's still in love with Blaine. That he always has been and that's why fucking all those men never actually helped.

Blaine sighs and asks him, "Will you be upset if I saw other people in the last six months?"

Kurt's face falls and he spills his coffee and Blaine's lips quirk to think that they're doing this over coffee, as always. "I'd be devastated," Kurt whispers, as he soaks up the mess. "But it wouldn't change how I felt."

"And you?" Blaine asks.

Kurt stares at him with drawn eyebrows and thinks of his biggest sins these last six months. The bad eating, the weekends spent in bed by himself, the crying over the phone to his best friend. He wonders if he should tell Blaine about the time he got dragged out clubbing and pushed up against someone who could have been Blaine in the dark, humid space, how he'd almost kissed him, had almost been kissed and yanked forward and pressed close on the dance floor. How the guy's eyes said 'take me home' and Kurt had ended up, instead, in the club bathroom, jerking himself off and biting back sobbing groans as he came.

It's not what Blaine means and he shakes his head.

Blaine tells him he hasn't had sex in over a year. He hasn't even kissed a guy and that last week when he kissed his friend Jess on the cheek he'd almost wanted to stay there, skin-to-skin.

Kurt laughs and he doesn't know why and then he nudges over the present, telling Blaine to open it.

Inside is a coffee machine, a grinder, all the accompaniments and a bag of beans from the Lima Bean. They're hardly the best coffee beans around but Blaine appreciates the symbolism. Blaine tells him he should have told him when he got there, that they could have made coffee together and tried it out and Kurt shakes his head.

"Are you going to take me back?" Kurt asks.

Blaine nods: that was always the plan, since the moment Kurt broke up with him, but Blaine needed time and distance to work things out, to see how it all fit in his head.

"Then this is for us, when we move in together."

For normal couples that's a bit much. But Blaine never plans on kissing another man. Even over the last twelve months it's never entered his mind. Kurt's been the same for six. They'll move in together.

"We take this slow, though," Blaine tells him and Kurt agrees.

Ten minutes later Blaine's wedged between the fridge and Kurt's hips, legs wrapped tight around and Kurt fucking up into him desperately. Neither one lasts long, neither one mentions how easily they'd both blindly found a condom in a pocket, a wallet. Kurt holds him there, still tight around him until his legs threaten to give way. They do upstairs and fuck twice more and then don't wake up until morning. Blaine's so happy he got his parents out of the house.

They go back to New York and it's kind of like dating each other again. They schedule actual times and places but within weeks they're meeting at a café half way between their new dorms. The year drags because they can't get enough of each other. Making up for lost time and Blaine has forgiven and quietly admitted he understands and Kurt has begged forgiveness enough. They don't quite forget but it doesn't really matter.

There are other things to beg each other for.

They start running together early on Saturday mornings. Returning to Blaine's room and spending the day in bed, in the shower, then back in bed. They go out at night and slowly assemble a group of friends around them.

When Kurt graduates into his dream job he fixes Blaine with a hard stare—over coffee, always over coffee—and then pulls out the photos of the apartment he can rent for a steal along with the job. Blaine hadn't quite appreciated just how well Kurt had done for himself until he saw the small but immaculate one bedroom apartment in glossy pictures spread across the table.

"You're moving in next weekend," Kurt tells him.

Blaine doesn't argue.

They flop exhausted into bed after pizza and moving and unpacking everything moved from dorms and Ohio and bought specifically for the space. They fall asleep without sex or even a kiss late on the Sunday night.

When Blaine wakes up Kurt isn't there and he frowns because he'd wanted so badly to wake up pressed against him. But then Kurt is, standing in the doorway with two hot mugs of coffee and carefully climbing on his knees onto the mattress to slide the cup into Blaine's hands.

It goes without saying he's somehow crept out and found the Christmas present from Ohio and set it up and gotten it working and made them coffee. They get off together as fast as they can because Kurt really can't be late to work in his second week.

Blaine graduates and gets offered a one year position in London. It's devastating but they don't for a second talk about breaking up. It's just a painful, annoying, tiresome separation. And after a year of being constantly together. Kurt only makes it over to London once. And Blaine comes home for Christmas but family gets in the way.

It's a hard year but by no means their hardest.

Kurt picks Blaine up from the airport with coffee and when Blaine tells him he's on full scholarship at NYU for his PhD, Kurt spills hot coffee down the back of Blaine's jacket as he forgets himself and hugs him in, tears in his eyes.

Kurt tells him casually on the way home that he's been contracted for three years at the magazine and given a promotion. Blaine kisses him then, in the back of the taxi, for the first time in months.

When they get home, they don't leave the bed except to pee, to get food and to make coffee. Carole and Burt visit the next weekend and share the excitement and quiet glances that all at once marvel at how obviously in love these boys are after all the separation but also just tilt subtly, as though there'd never been a doubt.

The PhD is difficult and Kurt leaves the magazine for work in a publishing house. They move apartments and have one colossal fight about getting a dog.

When Kurt proposes he's a little bit drunk. So is Blaine. But Kurt's been carrying the ring around with him for over a year and it's burning a hole in his pocket and the box is ruining the silhouette of his pants. He's drunk and it's a beautiful evening and they're back in Ohio surrounded by green grass and friends and the smell of good food and Blaine just said something ridiculously adorable.

So Kurt's dropping to his knee and fishing the box out of his pocket and is too far in to stop. "Blaine, shhhh, _shhhh, _Blaine, look. Hey. Marry me?" He cringes so hard to realize he's doing this.

He's more confused than anything else when Blaine looks shocked and then upset and is shaking his head and yanking him up. "No, no, no, no, _no. _Wait, wait."

Somewhere on the periphery he knows all their old high school friends, their parents, people they don't even know, are staring, watching this train wreck. Kurt should have asked the week before, in New York, somewhere romantic.

Blaine drops down to his knees with a clunk and stares up wit the biggest, most desperate puppy dog eyes Kurt's ever seen. "You marry me!" he declares, blue velvet box appearing from nowhere and popped open, and the silver ring inside glinting.

Kurt stares, wishes he hadn't had quite this much to drink and then drops down, both knees, like Blaine, in the grass—god, in the grass—"I asked first," he says in earnest and then kisses him and enjoys the laughter and whoops of encouragement behind them. They lean, forehead to forehead until they have to get up, brushing their knees off and sliding their respective rings back into their pockets.

Blaine whispers, "Ask me when we don't have an audience."

Somewhere off to the side, Finn points out that it's kind of a forgone conclusion that they say yes if they're both asking and starts pondering the politics of which gay should ask the other until Carole shushes him and finds him another beer.

They go back to New York on a Saturday and on Sunday Blaine wakes Kurt up with his mouth around his cock. Blaine gets him off like that but drags it out over a half hour and then crawls up Kurt's body, kisses him hard on the mouth and sits across his stomach to wipe at the corners of his own mouth. He slides away to the kitchen to make them coffee and Kurt basks in it.

They drink their coffee in silence, Blaine flicks through the newspaper, Kurt watches him, watches where he's still half-hard under the sheets and when his empty cup hits the bedside table, Kurt asks him how he wants it.

Blaine's eyes light up like it's Christmas. "Finger me?" he requests.

It's a bit strange, to request that, Kurt had wanted to fuck him, but maybe later. He grins and kisses an open-mouthed kiss across Blaine's nipple, making him arch.

"I want you wearing this, though." Blaine's hand scrambles on the bedside table and Kurt looks up from where he's slid halfway down Blaine's body. Blaine's coffee cup falls with a clink and then the blue velvet box is being placed an inch from Kurt's nose on Blaine's chest.

Kurt grins and clicks it open and stares. "That's not really the romantic proposal I imagined," he says not taking his eyes off the box, not able to stop himself from getting hard at the idea of the silver band around his finger, his finger deep inside Blaine.

But Blaine huffs and rolls out of the bed and onto the floor, onto one knee, box held out in front of him and he's comically naked when he proposes. The words are ridiculously romantic, pulled straight from a movie, undying love and the difficulties they've endured and wanting to be together forever and grow old and wake up every day together. It's all comically ridiculously perfect and there are tears in Blaine's eyes even as he grins and tries not to laugh.

He finishes and Kurt grabs the box from him and slides the band onto his ring finger. It fits tight and snug and looks stunning against his pale skin.

Blaine climbs over him again and kisses him hard and then flops to the side, onto his back. "I changed my mind," he says, managing to get Kurt's hand to his mouth, to kiss at his fingers, across the ring and then suck the skin into his mouth. "I want you inside me."

Kurt proposes two weeks later. It's entirely redundant because they've already set a date and started putting together lists of people and things to buy and songs to play. But Kurt had told Blaine he couldn't have his ring until he got his proposal.

Kurt does it right, classically, out at a restaurant over expensive, ridiculous food and service and candle light. Blaine hears him out, smiling and watching and then says yes and slides the ring onto his finger. They get home and get off in the kitchen because Kurt bends just a little too low to grab a bottle of water from the bottom shelf of the fridge. Blaine whispers promises of never getting over this, never tiring of it even a little as they both come.

They try to go to bed but end up getting dressed and going out to one of the clubs they frequented in undergrad. They grind up against each other and let the music beat through them and kiss in front of everyone with not-quite-matching wedding bands bright in the strobe lights.

They go for coffee afterwards at one of the 24 hour places down the street from their house. They don't speak a word but their feet keep knocking under the table.

A couple of years later their coffee machine breaks down. They're out shopping for a new one when Blaine mentions moving back to London.

Two years later they do it and Blaine postdocs for three more years at Oxford while Kurt tries writing freelance. They move back to the States, to Boston, and Kurt keeps writing and Blaine gets a lecturing position. Kurt sneaks into his lectures and watches him with a fond smile as he talks for hours about things Kurt still doesn't quite understand.

They still drink too much coffee.

They adopt two girls, they flip a coin to decide and feel guilty about being so flippant but they just want kids and don't really care about the rest. Anyway, Kurt's starting to believe in fate. The first is difficult and they fight more than ever and drink coffee until they both have shaking hands more often than not. The second, two years later, is easier. She sleeps better or maybe they're used to it all.

When the second goes off to her first day of school they go to their usual coffee shop and hold hands and wonder when it all got so amazing. Blaine points out, "Hasn't it always been?" and Kurt laughs at him.

And what's actually utterly unremarkable, what neither one of them will ever, ever know nor will anyone ever bother to fathom, is that that coffee, on a hotter than usual August day, is the half way point. They've had exactly the same number of coffees together in the past as they will have in the future. Thousands of coffees, in cafes and kitchens and in bed. And this is only half way.


End file.
